#oneaday Day 855: On my own

I'm alone in the house right now (apart from the cats), as Andie is away looking after her mother, who has just been in hospital. Nothing to worry about or anything, but she needs looking after for a few days, so I am holding the fort back home while she does that.

I tend to find when I'm alone in the house I want to behave… unusually. Last night I slept on the sofa for half of the night because I felt like it (and our sofa is quite comfy). I talk to myself. I tend to find that it's harder to break out of indecisive autistic funks. But I survive; I hang in there. I've done it before, I'll do it again, and I know it's not forever.

A lot of us probably don't think about loneliness as a serious consideration when we're younger. Indeed, when I was a teen, I remember people who were by themselves — voluntarily or otherwise — were routinely mocked as a "Larry" (as in "Larry Loner") because the norm was to have friends, and to be pretty much constantly surrounded by them.

Of course, that didn't stop some of us from feeling lonely in private, even when we did have friends. I often felt quite lonely and isolated due to the fact that I lived in a village that was seven miles away from where my school and friends were. When I was old enough to get the independence afforded by being able to cycle and, later, drive places by myself, it was a godsend; some of my fondest memories of my youth correspond with enjoying this freedom alongside others.

In fact, some of my absolute fondest memories of this time are also some of the least remarkable things that occurred, such as the one evening several friends and I drove to a pub in the middle of nowhere while listening to the cassette copy of my Essential Acid Jazz CD I'd prepared precisely for occasions like this, had a few drinks, stopped at the 24-hour Tesco petrol station for late-night sandwiches, and then went on our merry ways. It was a completely unremarkable evening, but it represented everything good about that time in our lives: the ability to be carefree; the ease with which you could surround yourself with people that cared about you; the freedom to do pretty much whatever you wanted, within reason. "Do what you want" doesn't have to be anything dramatic or fancy; sometimes, all you really want is to pass the time in good company.

I miss that. I really miss that. I am grateful and thankful to have the company of Andie most of the time, but when I'm on my own for a long period like this, I cannot help but wish for times past: times when people had time for one another, and when you could do things, with other people, on a whim without 1) having to prepare several months in advance, 2) without people being likely to drop out of proceedings at the last minute and 3) without people suddenly informing you that something you had been enjoying together for many years was actually not, in fact, to their taste, and that they didn't care it was important to you in particular.

We've gone terribly, horribly wrong somewhere. Human beings weren't made to be alone. And yet even with the myriad ways with which we can supposedly "connect" with one another today, it's hard not to feel exceedingly, excruciatingly lonely. Particularly when you really are, as I am right now, on your own.

Oh well. Nothing that can be done, really. Time to just make the best of thing and enjoy my last couple of days off before getting back to work on Monday.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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#oneaday Day 854: Resident. EEEVIL. FILM!

Today on my holidays, I rode the bus and I went to the cinema and I saw Resident Evil. It was nice and it was fun. I enjoyed the popcorn and the weird drink I had never heard of but which was quite nice.

Switching off the "seven year old writing about their holidays" mode, yes, I did indeed go to see Resident Evil at the cinema today. I had been promising myself this as something to do during my week off, and had always been intending to go while Andie was away, as I seriously doubted (correctly) that Andie would want to go and see it. I treated myself to a seat right at the front of the "nice" seats (the ones that recline!), a bucket of popcorn and a big drink. And it was a good time!

The movie itself is endearingly stupid. If I were to get analytical and critic-y about it, I would say that it is a sequence of largely unrelated vignettes featuring dialogue that primarily consists of the word "fuck", which are all quite entertaining in themselves, and which eventually build to a slightly unsatisfying conclusion. But this is not a movie intended to be taken seriously. It is a movie about spectacle, and wilfully observing that horror and comedy are, more often than not, very much adjacent to one another. It was a genuinely amusing movie — and it's clear that this was entirely intentional, too.

For the unfamiliar, the 2026 Resident Evil movie follows the misadventures of Bryan, a medical courier tasked with delivering a top-priority package to Raccoon City General Hospital. Along the way, his drive through the snowy night is interrupted by him hitting what he believes is a regular human being, but which becomes clear almost immediately is an infected person. He flees into a nearby spooky house after his "victim" causes a passing police officer to crash, and finds himself confronted with a variety of other monsters. The movie then charts his gradual journey towards his eventual destination, with a kind of half-hearted side plot about his fear of becoming a parent with his partner.

Resident Evil is not particularly "good" from a narrative perspective, then. It's largely a sequence of Things Happening, and Bryan's characterisation primarily consists of him saying "fuck" a lot and occasionally exhibiting half-arsed anguish over the fact he left his girlfriend hanging over a conversation about her apparently being pregnant.

But where it does shine is in its wilful adoption of the conventions of survival horror video games. The "everyman" protagonist who is barely competent at the things they end up forced to do as a result of the horrifying situation in which they find themselves. The inexplicable prevalence of locked doors that cannot be opened just by shooting the locks off them. The fact that incidental characters more often than not end up dead just a few minutes after they have been introduced. The gradual escalation of stakes in rough parallel with the level of firepower the protagonist has. And the way that, after not very long at all, you are almost desensitised to the sight of blood and gore, because there has just been so much of it.

In short, the film is primarily entertaining because of its overall vibes, rather than anything especially clever or noteworthy that it is doing with narrative, themes and characterisation. That's no bad thing, mind; if there's one thing Resident Evil as a video game series has never been strong on, it's narrative, themes and characterisation. The series knows that it is dumb and has always been dumb, and prides itself on its predictability in many ways — but that doesn't, in any way, stop it from being enjoyable. In fact, for many people, it is this "switch your brain off and just enjoy the absurdity" mentality that keeps them coming back for more Resident Evil games; the series is a deliberate and stark contrast to Silent Hill in this regard, and it means that the two can happily coexist, despite the original Silent Hill being initially regarded as Konami's response to Capcom's series back on its original release.

So I enjoyed the Resident Evil movie, then, and I'm glad I went to see it at the cinema. The big screen and the general environment added to the experience a great deal; the fact seeing a movie at the cinema is something you cannot help but enjoy in the moment, without external distractions (hopefully — turn your fuckin' phone off!) really helped, too.

I'm not going to be in any rush to see it again or pick it up on Blu-Ray or anything, but I am glad I went, I am glad I experienced it — and I agree with many people that, while it has many shortcomings taken as a movie on its own merits, as an adaptation of its source material and an homage to video games in general, it does a fantastic job.

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#oneaday Day 853: Hey I'm grump

I have been grumpy for the past couple of days, as you have probably noticed. In my defence, 1) I think I am perfectly justified in the things I have been grumpy about, and 2) I have not been feeling well. I have had just that general feeling of "the ick" since I woke up yesterday morning, escalating to an on-and-off stomachache and myriad poos today. I don't think there is anything left inside me to evacuate. Delightful!

Still, it has been an excuse to vegetate on the sofa beneath a duvet and drink proper Lucozade, which are two things you can only really get away with doing when you're ill. And, thankfully, I have a surfeit of riches to enjoy in the video game department right now: I've just recently finished Silent Hill: Townfall, so now I'm on Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve, which seems marvellous so far, and I'm also dipping into Star Wars Galactic Racer and Little Goody Two-Shoes, the latter of which is a nice spooky season follow-up to Silent Hill. Oh, and hopping back into Super Mario Galaxy 2 at the times where the stomachache and/or need to poo precludes anything that requires me to pay attention, like following a story or flying a plane.

It is also… fortunate(? I guess?) that this has happened during a week I have off work. I mean, obviously I would prefer to not be ill at all, but if you're going to be ill in a manner that is not exactly debilitating or preventing you from doing normal things, it is better to do so at a time where you are not expected to be sitting at your computer doing something vaguely useful and being at the beck and call of Microsoft fucking Teams.

Anyway, I am hoping I will feel a bit better tomorrow. Andie has gone away for a few days as her mother is having a hip replacement operation tomorrow and will need a bit of looking after, so I'm on my own in the house until some point next week. Assuming I do feel better tomorrow, I want to make at least some vaguely "productive" use of the day — and I use the term loosely, because I am on holiday. By "productive" I mean either recording some new YouTube videos, or perhaps going to the cinema to see the new Resident Evil movie, which I have heard lots of good things about. Or perhaps even both!

I have not been to the cinema for a very long time. The last movie I saw in the cinema was with Andie, who doesn't watch a lot of movies other than stuff she has Legitimately Acquired and puts on in the background while she is working. That movie was Bridesmaids, which came out in 2011. I have watched a couple of movies on DVD or Blu-Ray since then, but not many, so I just thought it might be a nice… novelty to go to the cinema by myself, go see something that Andie most definitely will not want to see, stuff myself with popcorn, treat myself to the comfy chairs and so forth. I will make a decision on that in the morning; I'm more inclined to go do that tomorrow on a weekday when it will be quiet, rather than at the weekend, but if I am still feeling like The Great Mighty Poo is performing a selection of arias inside me tomorrow, I may rethink that plan.

Anyway, I am off to chew on some chalk, drink some milk and lie face-down for a bit, I think. To a brighter and hopefully pain-free tomorrow!

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#oneaday Day 852: Rotting retro

You know, I have historically thought that out of all the subcommunities of computer and tech enthusiasts, the one which would have more respect for doing things "the hard way" than anyone else would be the retro fans. These are people who, in many cases, grew up seeing genius programmers making limited hardware do things far beyond its supposed capabilities, and, even if they never saw fit to take up programming themselves, could at least understand why it was impressive when, for example, someone made an Atari 8-bit display 256 colours on screen at the same time.

Sadly, it is increasingly looking as if the retro sphere, much like everyfuckingthing else, has been infiltrated, corrupted, poisoned and rotted by the scourge that is generative AI.

In just the last week, I have seen myriad vibe-coded "recompilation" projects, slop peddlers attempting to submit 50k lines of changes to an FPGA core that was already working just fine, the Oliver Twins making it abundantly clear what their odious stance is, web-based editors for the ZX Spectrum games Chaos and Target: Renegade slapped together using AI coding tools and someone making the bold claim that they have been "working on" (i.e. they prompted Claude to do it for them) multiplayer conversions of a variety of classic games for home computers and consoles, including Wizard of Wor, Pac-Man, Super Mario Bros. and Metroid. Oh, and someone who claimed to have decompiled Adobe's entire Creative Cloud suite of software and made a "clean room" version of it that doesn't work, like, at all, but that's not exactly retro. Still relevant, though.

The irritating thing is that a lot of these projects sound like they could be potentially interesting! 4-player Pac-Man on Atari 8-bit is a cool idea! Simultaneous co-op in Super Mario Bros. and Metroid are potentially intriguing twists on classic games! Tweaking retro games to play in different ways has been a proud tradition ever since everyone learned what the POKE command does!

And yet, I cannot, will not support any of these projects in good conscience. I just cannot. I cannot bring myself to give any sort of "reward" — and attention is a form of reward — to someone who thinks that throwing something into Claude Code and getting it to spit out something that looks convincing at first glance (but is probably deeply, deeply broken under the hood) is "working on something". I do not care that it looks impressive, at first glance, that you can click a button and some sort of functional-seeming, executable code pops out of the other end.

Because, really, what is the point? These projects are not put out into the wild with any attempt of aiding our collective understanding of things; they are put out in an attempt to accumulate clout, pure and simple. People want to be the first to do something, or the only person to do something, and the assumption, today, appears to be that the best way to do this is "just get AI to do it". Except then you haven't done anything yourself, have you? You have used a technology based on the stolen creativity and expertise of humanity, which consumes vast amounts of energy and water, which is unsustainably expensive to maintain beyond the next couple of years at most, which often gets things flat-out wrong, and which is responsible for making the Internet seven hundred thousand orders of magnitude worse than it has ever been, and you have got it to churn out something that, if you had to debug it yourself, you almost certainly wouldn't know where to start.

The standard counterargument to all this is "well, if this person hadn't done their little Claude Code project, it wouldn't have happened at all". And that, to me, is not a convincing case. It's a waste of time and money (but not effort) to produce something that, at first glance, appears to be "good enough" rather than something which has actually been crafted to work properly and perfectly — and in the meantime, it discourages people who are still doing this sort of thing properly to continue with their own projects, because that whole part of the scene has now been tainted with Claudeslop, and we've already seen with a variety of projects how disheartening that can be for some.

I think my biggest concern with all this is the long-term brain drain effect it will have. We're already seeing frightening numbers of people completely surrendering to the AI's "judgement" (which isn't a thing, but they believe it is) rather than thinking for themselves. And the end result, the longer all this goes on, is that actual skills and knowledge will atrophy. As the people who did this "the hard way" back in the day start to pass on — and many of them are passing on at this point, sadly — there will not be a generation of people who can take over. And when all this AI nonsense eventually collapses — which it will, as there is no way the world's economy can keep up this absolute insanity forever — it's going to leave a lot of people, projects and AI-corrupted enthusiast scenes in a real mess.

Now, you might think that doesn't matter for 40+ year old 8-bit home computers, but it absolutely does. Understanding how things work and how to recreate the conditions from back in the day is a crucial part of preserving the history of the medium, and the second you prompt Claude to just do it for you, you are wilfully saying that doesn't matter; you are wilfully disrespecting people who still know how to do all this stuff the old-fashioned way.

It matters. Your personal clout, on the other hand, does not, particularly if said clout has been accumulated by not really doing anything.

Maybe I should learn 6502 assembler just to spite these people.

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#oneaday Day 851: Abandon ship?

Earlier today, the thoroughly lovely Quest 64 Official account on Bluesky (actually, in their own words, an account that has "spent nearly a decade attempting to rehab the way people view Quest 64/games in general", which is a sentiment I am 100% on board with) expressed frustration over a YouTube video they had seen cross their feed, which promised "12 longest N64 games that will take forever to beat!"

Now, that might not sound like a particularly offensive topic for a video, and it arguably isn't — even if it is both clichéd and clickbaity. What was offensive was… well, it was a lot of things. The video's thumbnail, which showed an obvious AI-generated approximation of Quest 64 rather than an actual screenshot. The fact Quest 64 was the poster boy for this topic in the first place (Quest 64 is approximately 12 hours long, which is very short by RPG standards). The fact that the channel, "Retro Pocket", very obviously uses an AI-generated logo — and thus it is not unreasonable to assume that the entire video may well be AI-generated.

"Now I have to not only fight the past," Quest said, "but future AI misinformation. It's becoming increasingly clear my Internet days are numbered, sadly." He went on to criticise the growing "Claudepuke" scene in the recompilation and modding scenes — something which has driven me to despair of late also.

The thing that made me most sad about this — and I feel sad and angry about all of it, make no mistake — is the fact that a person as thoroughly admirable and pleasant as Quest is should have to feel this way; like his contributions to online culture are no longer welcome, appreciated or worthwhile continuing with. I say this as someone who both follows the Quest 64 Official account, and has casually chatted with the person behind the account outside the context of public-facing social media: we need more people like this, not fewer.

It makes me sad, because I get it. As someone who still runs both a personal blog and an enthusiast, non-commercial video game website, I am a relic of a past age. I refuse to engage with short-form vertical video because I fucking hate it as a medium. I am tired of clickbait, AI slop, YouTubers covering the same few topics over and over again (I tried everything by BRAND! Testing VIRAL TIKTOK recipes! I bought AI SLOP PRODUCTS!) and headlines that refuse to name the proper noun that is the subject of the story. And yet with each passing day, I feel more and more like I cannot escape any of those things. I feel more and more like I am not welcome on an Internet I was once excited to be a part of. That offline existence feels increasingly appealing.

And yet I don't want to give up. I still remember that wide-eyed wonderment that my whole family had when we were first looking at Web pages in a crash-prone copy of Mosaic when CompuServe first added access to the broader Internet. I still remember the first time we ordered something online. I still remember the first time I chatted to someone online and formed a genuine friendship as a result. I refuse to accept that Internet is completely gone.

I feel like those of us who have been online since the beginning (or the beginning of it being relatively "mainstream", anyway) have just as much right to exist on the Internet as those who are systematically destroying everything that used to be great about it. In fact, if I'm honest, I feel like we have more right to exist than those who are systematically destroying everything that used to be great about it. I would be sad to see Quest 64 Official stop posting. I would be elated to never see anything from Sam Altman, Wario Amodei, Mark Zuckerberg and their ilk ever again.

But I don't know what to do, other than to stubbornly Keep Posting. To keep writing this silly little personal blog here, to keep penning my in-depth thoughts about video games I've played, and to steadfastly refuse to get on board with technological trends that are actively, demonstrably harmful to the concept of "culture" in general. To prove that there is still a place for The Old Internet.

So that's all I can do, really. Just Keep Posting. I refuse to let the fuckheads win. I will, hopefully, still be here when all the AI companies collapse and the world endures a hitherto unprecedented financial crisis that brings the very concept of capitalism to complete ruin. And I will be laughing. And probably crying a bit. But mostly laughing.

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#oneaday Day 850: Fuck the Oliver Twins

I don't say this lightly, as I am that rare breed who legitimately, genuinely enjoyed the Dizzy games and believe a lot of their other prior output is excellent — particularly Firehawk on NES, which is an excellent tactical helicopter shoot 'em up that actually predates Desert Strike! But after seeing their recent output, and particularly reading these comments over on Time Extension, I say a full-throated, from-the-bottom-of-my-heart fuck off to Philip and Andrew Oliver.

The Oliver Twins are the textbook examples of "bedroom programmers" from the classic British home computer scene. They made games at home using their own skills and creativity, and achieved quite deserved success with many of them. Yes, I know a lot of people denigrate the Dizzy series in particular these days — particularly people from North America — but the fact is, these games had a place, and they achieved what they set out to do: provide a fun, distinctive mascot character, and a varied selection of games in which he appeared.

As such, I've always had respect for them and what they achieved. They helped define the British home computer scene of the 1980s, which, as you know, is a sector of gaming that is of enormous personal interest and relevance to me — even if I only had a chance to come to their stuff once we were into the Atari ST era, since they didn't make anything for the Atari 8-bit. I have genuinely fond memories of playing their stuff from back then, even if some of it doesn't hold up brilliantly (hello, Panic Dizzy on ST) and I had a lot of fun discovering a variety of their games I'd never played with The Oliver Twins Collection from the first year of Evercade, prior to me joining the company.

But with their current stance on AI, they have absolutely lost the fucking plot and seem to be wilfully ignorant of the overall mood in the room.

Let's go through some of the things they said in response to the questions from John Szczepaniak of Time Extension, shall we?

"We believe that, as creatives, it is another creative tool."

Literally the first answer is parroting the inevitable, probably LLM-generated in the first place, copypasta about it being "just a tool". Try harder.

"…in the right hands, we can create some awesome stuff that would have been impossible to create any other way."

Bollocks. Citation fucking needed. How, exactly, would it have been "impossible" to churn out things any other way than using generative AI?

"I'm sorry, but as an experiment, to create Emerald City, and all the art that went into this, it would have been an over-a-year project with a couple of artists, probably a hundred thousand pounds, all said and done when you're looking at all the costs."

Motherfucker, you literally ran a Kickstarter to fund your AI slop project. Ask for that £100,000 then pay some fucking artists with it! The reason your £5,000 Kickstarter failed is not because it was a fundamentally bad project, but because the project page, all the promotional material and literally everything about the project was drenched in generative AI imagery. This meant that people, on the whole, did not want to fund it. Because what is the point in paying for something the creators clearly have so little respect for themselves? Why would anyone want to fund your token habit?

If you had been honest and open about needing money, time and specialists to pull something off, I'm pretty sure a name as well-known and once-respected as the Oliver Twins would have been able to run a successful £100,000 Kickstarter without a problem. And whining and complaining that a project would take over a year, oh boo-fucking-hoo, creative projects require work over a significant period of time? Who would have fucking thought it?

"Now, as for scraping IP and all of that kind of stuff, I believe there should be regulations about what AI is trained on. I, unfortunately, do not run OpenAI or any of these other big gigs. As humble little guys just making Dizzy games, we can't control that. We could completely ignore a very powerful creative tool and then decide to produce nothing because it's too difficult to produce the quality that we want. And so we could go quietly into our retirement, or we can go, this is exciting! We love tech. We are sci-fi guys. This is an incredible time to be alive for a creator."

I can't believe they actually said the "humble little guys" thing out loud. We're just humble little guys who deserve some crumbs of stolen creative material. Have some fucking principles. You may not run OpenAI, Anthropic or any of the other shits destroying everything nice at the moment, but you can have the principles to not engage with the product that everyone hates and which is making everything worse. You can read the room and understand that people fucking hate this, and they hate shit that looks like your Emerald City garbage, but for the most part people are too polite to say that to your face or within potential earshot of you.

All it sounds like is that you wanted to be able to churn out something quickly, cheaply and with minimal effort, which does not sound like being a "creator". It sounds like two old men trying desperately to jump on a trend and cynically produce a product — worse, content — with no lasting value, and a morally bankrupt attitude towards the way it is produced.

Fuck the Oliver Twins, and fuck their stinking attitude. I once respected them as creators — and still do respect the work they both did when they were younger. But the men they are now, and the slop they are apparently desperate to produce as quickly and cheaply as possible? Completely and utterly dead to me.

Cunts.

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#oneaday Day 849: Do people really not finish games?

I've seen it often suggested that "no-one finishes games" these days. Is that really true? I don't know. I am certainly not a representative example here, because I tend to only start games that I know I am going to finish for the most part. It might take quite a while to finish some of these games, if they're epic-length RPGs, but I will generally make an effort to finish everything I start. I have a mostly positive success rate.

I'm interested in this perception that no-one finishes games any more, because it's one of those things that is an alien concept to me — particularly with story-based games. Can you really derive any sort of satisfaction from playing a narrative-focused game and just leaving it unresolved? I guess in some ways it's the same as watching part of a TV series and then dropping it partway through. But it's still kind of alien to me.

So I thought what I'd do today is go through some games I can think of off the top of my head that one might regard as "popular", then see what the Steam Achievement rate is for "finished the game" or equivalent achievements. I appreciate this is an imperfect metric, because it doesn't take into account other platforms (particularly those which don't have achievements, like Switch) but it'll do for a rough idea. All right, let's take a look.

Pragmata

42.3% of people who played Capcom's Pragmata on Steam finished it to the point of seeing the credits roll on a first playthrough. This is a reasonably respectable number so far as I'm concerned, and I'm unsurprised to see this so relatively high to kick us off. Pragmata was praised as one of the first genuinely excellent triple-A games for quite a long time, so it's encouraging to see this many people play it through to completion.

It is less than half of the people who started it, though.

We see a big drop-off when it comes to completing optional material, though. 13.4% completed the main objective in all the Training Simulator side activities, which I completely empathise with; the Training Simulator is by far the worst part of the game and I absolutely hated every second of it. I am, therefore, unsurprised that a similar number of people went through and completed the postgame scenario, "Unknown Signal", since that involves running through a series of Training Simulator-like missions — only without the annoying bits. However, if you weren't to know about the "without the annoying bits" part, I can completely understand you not wanting to bother with it. And the additional bit you get on the ending for completing Unknown Signal is absolutely not worth it, either.

Resident Evil Requiem

Would you look at that? Nearly 75% of people have beaten Resident Evil Requiem, one of the most well-regarded entries in the series for quite some time. Only 65% of them beat it on "Standard (Modern)" difficulty, though, suggesting that all the Difficulty Level Discourse we've been having for the last few years has had an effect; there's a small but statistically significant number of people who had no qualms about playing on the lowest difficulty level.

Interestingly there is a different percentage for "complete the game on at least Casual difficulty" and "complete the game" ("Hope and Requiem"). I wonder how that happened?

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

We look at a longer game now with Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Here, just under 40% of people actually finished the game. I can sort of understand it in this case, because although Expedition 33's main narrative is thoroughly compelling and emotionally engaging, the gameplay is challenging enough that I can see a significant number of people falling off before the end. It's one of those instances where although the developers made a huge, beautiful world and obviously want as many people as possible to see it, they also weren't willing to compromise on the mechanical intricacies of the game. Respect to them for that, but it does mean that significantly less than half of the players who started the game finished it.

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth

Pity poor Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, though, a game where only just over a quarter of people who started it played it through to completion. This is another one that is arguably understandable due to the vast size of the game, but the team behind the game have got to be looking at that figure and feeling a bit disheartened.

But at least it's not the original Final Fantasy VII, which only 8.7% people who played it on Steam have finished. It's a shorter game! But there's also the fact that a lot of the people who would be inclined to buy Final Fantasy VII on Steam have nostalgia for having played it on PlayStation back in the '90s, and as such they may have just fired it up for a session or two to indulge that nostalgia, then set it aside. Less than 10% kind of sucks, though, because I'm sure there's some people coming to it for the first time, starting it and then never seeing it through to its magnificent conclusion.

Blue Prince

Honestly I'm surprised that nearly 40% of people finished Blue Prince, because it's the kind of game that repels you hard if you're not into it. But then you might say that the sort of people inclined to pick up Blue Prince probably already know that it's a game they'll like, and thus there should be a respectable proportion of them who finish it.

I didn't stick with Blue Prince long enough to know if this trophy encompasses all the endgame bullshit you have to do other than playing the annoying house layout game, but either way, even getting as far as just finishing the annoying house layout game is worthy of respect so far as I'm concerned.

Fuckin' hate that game.

I think that'll do for now. I know that's probably far from a representative or statistically significant sample, but on the whole, it seems like, on average, less than half of the people who start a game on Steam finish it. The games that are more likely to get finishes are ones that are on the shorter side, like Resident Evil, while longer RPGs inevitably see a much more significant drop-off. More niche-interest titles likely enjoy a slightly higher completion percentage due to the people playing having a sort of "vested interest" in the game and the genre it occupies, but still.

Anyway, I'm not sure I have a point here. So long as games that you can complete continue to exist, I will continue completing them, one at a time, because that's how I enjoy playing. If you're someone who doesn't beat games, do make an effort to finish one or two. I can pretty much guarantee you'll find it to be a satisfying experience. Just be warned: once you start in earnest, you'll want to beat everything you play… and for some, that way lies madness!

At least you're not chasing platinum trophies. That really is a sure-fire way to ruin all enjoyment of video games.

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#oneaday Day 848: Initial impressions from St. Amelia

I've been playing Silent Hill Townfall! It is good. I think I am enjoying it more than Silent Hill f, but I do intend to go back and give that another go (and a shot at one or more of the other endings) for the sake of fairness, comparison and suchlike.

Silent Hill Townfall is quite a different sort of game, though. For starters, it's presented from a first-person perspective rather than Silent Hill f's third-person viewpoint, and it places a strong emphasis on stealth rather than combat. There is combat — and it's modern-day, weighty, get-hit-once-and-half-your-health-bar-is-gone combat — but for the most part, sneaking around pretty much always seems to be an option, and in some cases is outright essential. I am fine with this.

I know some people don't like stealth much, but when it's executed well, it can be a great part of a game — and it's especially fitting with the horror genre. It makes absolute thematic sense to be creeping around monsters who very much do not have your best interests at heart rather than attacking them, and it especially fits with Silent Hill's traditional idea of a relatively "normal" person being the protagonist.

Silent Hill Townfall also provides you with some excellent tools to help with the stealth part. The main one is a little portable CRT television which you can "tune in" to monsters' frequencies, and this allows you to "see" them, even through walls. At other times, you have a pager whose LCD display shows the direction that monsters are in, but not details. Most of the monsters move in clear patterns, so the stealth sequences tend to boil down to puzzles of sorts: how best to get across the area while avoiding ending up in their line of sight.

There's excellent use of sound, too. When you're visible and vulnerable to a monster, the background audio builds in a gradual crescendo before eventually giving a "boom" when they're actively pursuing you. Likewise, you can tell when you've reached safety, because the background audio chills out a bit. Very clever and subtle.

I'm not entirely sure what's going on in the narrative as yet, but that's par for the course with the series. There is a lot of… medical stuff going on, though. Medical stuff in general gives me the squick, so it's ideal horror fodder for me; when combined with some of the other stuff Silent Hill Townfall is doing, I'm very happy at the experience it has provided thus far.

Highlights for me in the seven or eight hours I've apparently played since yesterday include some puzzles that involve creatively interpreting video footage to determine a combination number subtly hidden within; an inordinately stressful sequence in which you are tasked with performing various medical procedures on a patient while a complete cunt of a doctor yells at you over an intercom for being incompetent; and a puzzle based around locating blood bags, pairing them up with the appropriate medical charts, and then combining them to crack a code that unlocks a door.

I'm not crazy about the "instant death" monster who showed up during the blood bag sequence (only during the hunting for the blood bags, not during the puzzly part, thankfully) but, as previously noted, the sneaky-sneaky nature of most of the game means that you're already well-trained at avoiding monsters by the time you run into it anyway.

I'm looking forward to seeing where the story goes. There's already been some intriguing weirdness to it all, but I have no idea where it's going to end up just yet. We shall see, I guess — that is, if Ace Combat 8 doesn't distract me from it too much…

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#oneaday Day 847: Skeletons

I've been following this Jacob Geller business with mild interest. I have no particular "horse in the race", as it were, as I don't really know who he is, haven't watched any of his videos and don't own his book(s), but it's clear that his work meant a lot to people and thus, the recent revelations about him have genuinely hurt those people.

If you haven't been following this, Jacob Geller is a video essayist who apparently does some good things about video games. As I say, I've never watched his stuff (and am probably not going to now) but, prior to all this, he seemed to have a pretty solid reputation as being a decent human being. Progressive, even. Now, of course, that trust has been broken; in a statement he put out yesterday, Geller noted that the whole situation is "the biggest regret of his life", but regardless of those regrets and what he has done since that time, to a lot of people — particularly his biggest fans — that past indiscretion is a permanent blot on the copybook.

And I'm not even saying that's wrong. Sexual assault is, of course, no laughing matter, and for it to get as far as the victim invoking "Title IX" (whatever that is, I don't know American law for obvious reasons) means that it must have been pretty serious. It's entirely understandable that, even though that offence took place many years ago at this point, some people simply cannot trust this person ever again.

What I find myself wondering is how this keeps happening. I feel like for the last few years, we've seen a steady stream of people who build up a following and a fanbase in the public eye online, only for it to come out that, at some point in their past, they were a despicable human being and may or may not, in fact, actually still be one, despite the front that they've been putting up to the world. And every time it happens I just wonder: what happened to these people? How did their life end up that way?

Perhaps it's a personality type thing: the person who is likely to find success at YouTube and streaming in 2026 is also the type of person who is likely to have sexually assaulted someone ten years ago. I don't really think that's true. I know people personally who have been doing YouTube for that long and, to my knowledge, none of them has ever done anything like that. I guess that's always the point in these kinds of situations, though; you never really know until something comes out about them.

Does that mean everyone should be looked on with mistrust? Of course not; that's no way to live. But I don't blame people for being wary at this point. It's happened too many times.

I think in my case I'm just confused because everything about all this is just a completely alien concept to me. I'm not saying this in a self-aggrandising "look at me, I'm a wonderful person" sort of way; I just mean that the very idea of treating another human being with such a lack of respect is so utterly unthinkable to me that I simply cannot imagine how people like this ended up doing what they did. But it only takes one lapse of judgement to bring a career to an end — those consequences might not be for ten years or more, as we've seen here, but it seems they are pretty likely to catch up with them eventually.

Perhaps it's for the best that I've always been riddled with social anxiety and have thus led quite a straightforward, normal and boring life. If nothing else, it means that Past Me has never been in a position to acquire any skeletons in his closet. And I'm glad about that. Not because I have any particular designs on Internet Fame or anything, despite the amount of stuff I post publicly. But because it means I can continue existing with a clear conscience.

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#oneaday Day 846: Eye for an eye

We are brought up with, it's fair to say, somewhat conflicting messages on the subject of revenge. On the whole, we are mostly discouraged from it on the grounds that it doesn't necessarily solve anything, and any momentary high you might feel from delivering it will likely be short-lived. But we're also bombarded with popular media that makes revenge look cool.

I've gone through my life trying my best to not hold grudges too much, but there are a few times I've been wronged where I just cannot, with good conscience, let it go. In each of these situations, I feel like part of me desires revenge on the person (or group) who wronged me, but I have not, to date, had the opportunity to follow up on any of these desires. And I honestly don't know if I would, given the opportunity.

But the thought is there. It's always there.

There's one thing the objects of my grudges all have in common: they were all in positions of power, and they all abused that power in some way. Whether that was for their own material gain or the end result simply being hurting someone (me), they all leveraged the power they held in a way that ended up having a negative impact on someone else's life. And not always just me, either.

For the sake of… I don't know, propriety? I will refrain from naming specific examples here. But it's been long enough now for one of them that I think I can talk in slightly more than vague terms.

I used to have a job that I absolutely loved. It was a job that involved using my skills and passion every day, and I thought it was a job that would set me for life. I liked the people that I worked with, and I did well at the work itself. All looked good for a while, but over time, the people in charge started to see fit to… start exerting their influence more than they perhaps had done in the past. And this started to come to a head with a colleague of mine who ended up dismissed from his position — which, like me, he had loved and always given his all to — on the grounds of some spurious accusations about his behaviour. I know they were spurious because I worked with this guy every day and there is no way in hell he would have done anything the slightest bit inappropriate, whatever that might mean to you. (It wasn't anything sexual or violent he was accused of, I hasten to add.)

But he had a target marked on him from thereon, and during the long and painful process of his disciplinary proceedings leading to his dismissal, he asked me to be his second in the various meetings involved along the way. I looked up what a "second" was supposed to do in this situation, and determined that they had the right to ask questions and help to defend the person who had nominated them. So I did. I assembled a set of questions that would help my colleague explain that this was all complete nonsense, and that he had been maliciously targeted… and I was basically told to shut up partway through proceedings. Naturally, as you might expect, that then caused a target to appear on my back, too — again, despite me having not actually done anything wrong. I hadn't even had a single complaint from a customer in my case.

The injustice of it all stung back then. It was excruciating to see first my colleague and friend pushed out of his position, and then to see it happen to not just me but several others of our number also. The people who had all the power in this situation were very obviously misusing it. Why? I do not know. I don't know what they would "get" out of losing several of their best employees — and there were ample metrics to back up that boast, in the form of the "NetPromoter" surveys all our clients had the option to fill out after a session with us — other than a sense that they were in control, this was their domain.

Regrettably, I encountered a very similar scenario on multiple subsequent occasions, and it was always the same. There was always one individual at the centre of it all, who had developed something of a God complex based on the little power they had over other people — or rather, the fact they held the keys to people's careers. In every instance, these people exerted their influence in a way that hurt others, poisoned the atmosphere around them and couldn't have been any benefit to them and their team whatsoever. And not one of them saw any consequences for their actions that might discourage them from doing it again. So they almost certainly have done it again since.

These are the people I want revenge on. These are the people I've never been able to forgive and forget. These are the people who, if I ever saw them again, I would… I don't know. I'm not a violent man, and I have no desire to end up with any sort of assault charge. But if any people in the world deserve a good punch in the face and/or balls (where applicable), it's these people I'm thinking of right now.

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